iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Here are the results you’ve been waiting for: the results of http://RimCount.com tracking of the Roll Up The Win Campaign from a large Canadian Coffee and Donut chain.

http://RimCount.com collected tweets with the hastag #rolluptherim and extracted ratios and recorded them.

The site really took off when it started tweeting back with the Twitter account http://twitter.com/rimcountdotcom . The site automated the awarding and notification of “badges” for different items like drinking more than one “rim” a day, or tweeting about it more than once a day. Of course the best and worst record holders were notified. I was also contacted by the author of the Facebook App “My Rollups” http://apps.facebook.com/myrollups to compare notes – looks like Facebook users are a little luckier.

Here they are, as unscientifically tracked on Twitter, in 2011 there were:

• 21552 rims
• 4181 wins
• 17439 losses
• 13007 tweets
• 5853 Total tweet’ers

Here’s a Wordle of the top 150 words tweeted with the hastag #rolluptherim (without that tag)

Here’s looking forward to next year!

The BlackBerry Playbook coming out on April 19^th has some familiar plays in it – if you grew-up in Ontario:

1. RIM is a Waterloo-based company
2. RIM is/was known for their trackball
3. The device is running the QNX operating system, developed by Waterloo/Ottawa-based QNX Software Systems (which RIM just bought)
4. The screen and input device is are an all-in-one deisgn
5. The whole enterprise seems like a string of poor decisions to create something that will be expensive and will not be successful

Where have we seen these plays before?

The Unisys ICON! Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON

The computer built specifically for use in Ontario schools commissioned by the Ontario Ministry of Education.

(Thanks for the image, Old-Computers.com)

Unisys ICON computers were kicking around my public school when I was a kid. They didn’t do much beyond very basic word-processing and had a lot of games on them, thanks to the local board of education, and a few of my friends. They were all networked, and relatively reliable, save for the poor teacher/”computer lead” who gave admin access to some of the Grade 8 students.

The ICONs had a trackball (the PlayBook won’t, but the BlackBerry Pearl and others do), it had an all-in-one hardware design, and sat in the corner of our classroom, mostly unused.

The most relevant commonality is that the old ICONs were running the QNX operating system!

The ICON was ultimately deemed too expensive to keep in use or develop for and was cast-off in favour of Apple and others’ more user friendly products.

So now you know Ontario: when you think BlackBerry Playbook, think Unisys ICON.

Update: Tuesday April 19, 2011

Apparently two more things they have in common is no E-Mail application and they both can’t connect to the internet on their own!

As the 2011 season is almost upon us I’m once again encouraging you to sign-up for Mitch & Brooke’s F1 Fantasy Racing League at http://www.fantasyautoracers.com/f1_01/

This will be Mitch & Brooke’s F1 Fantasy Racing League 14^th year in a row and my third participating. I encourage you to make your team to compete against ZERO Racing, my team. It makes the season that much more fun.

The deadline for the first race is 1 hour before race time on Sunday, March 27th. Go to http://www.fantasyautoracers.com and sign up now to make sure you get your team in before that deadline. The site looks like it could use a visual update… working on that. But I’m sure you can look past that.

To get you in the mood, here’s a great tribute to Ayrton Senna from Top Gear, featuring Lewis Hamilton. Can’t wait for the new season or to see the Senna movie!

I’m a big fan of http://famfamfam.com ‘s free icon set Silk. The Silk icon set contains over thousand simple icons that are free to use for any purpose. All those at famfamfam.com ask is that you include a link back to there web page in your credits famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/.

The icons are so simple as small that it makes a lot of sense to include them in your web site’s CSS file as Data URIs. Here’s my web page containing the Silk icon set as CSS/Data URIs.

For your connivence, here is the Silk icon set as data URIs. (Warning: 2.1Mb file!) Copy and paste as needed.

My little hobby web site for tracking your luck with a large Canaidan coffee and donuts chain’s roll-up promotion is back!

My previous attempt was Drupal-based, and required an account. I was never very happy with the account requirement, and played with it being a facebook App but ultimately took the site down (described in this blog post). This time there’s no need for an account as it’s Twitter-based. This also helps with the promotional side of things.

I had hoped to partner with the www.rimrollerapp.com – but that Twitter based iPhone App needed a technical update, and for other reasons, it’s now removed from the App Store. It’s too bad, but you don’t need anything beyond a Twitter account to enjoy http://RimCount.com.

Simply tweet with the tag #RollUpTheRim to have your tweet listed on http://RimCount.com. The site tracks results posted to Twitter in the format of wins/rims (and unofficially, a few other formats).

You can visit the main page for the latest, the scoreboard for the best and worst ratios http://rimcount.com/scoreboard. There’s also a rapidly growing list of Twitter users who have tweeted with the hashtag #RollUpTheRim http://rimcount.com/list

The site is no longer Drupal-based, but some of the PHP from the Drupal module I wrote and the MySQL data structure were migrated to the new site which is otherwise built from scratch.

As many developers have indicated, working with Twitter.com’s non-standard API is quite a joy. I was able to get things rolling (pun intended) quite quickly based on the simple twitter searches through Twitter’s search service’s RSS feed and looking-up someone’s Twitter details via an XML call is easy too.

The hardest part has been writing the PHP to search a tweet for a ratio. Challenges have gone beyond simply adapting for ratios like “x/x” or “x for x” or “x-x”, etc. My original work only work with ratios under ten, then when I adapted it I had to protect agains numbers that were near by but not part of the ratio. I’m only 90% I’ve stopped mathematically impossible ratios and ratios like “3-3 cups were losers!”. The struggle continues. What I have done, like Twitter.com, I’ve added an option from the admin side to disregard a tweet or twitter user.

If you have a Twitter account please tweet your results with the large Canaidan coffee and donuts chain’s roll-up promotion and check http://RimCount.com to see how your results compare to others’.